I Won't Be Left
by ColorsFadexx
Summary: When Addison finds herself in a rut, faced with what may be the toughest decision of her life, guess who is there for her through and through? Could the one thing she's keeping from him be the end of it all? AddisonAlex.


**I****Won't****Be****Left**

**A/N **Hey, everyone! I'm new to FF, but this isn't really my first fic, though I am fairly beginner-ish at writing. I'm only thirteen, anyway, so I'm not like, Dickens, or anything. But, anyway, if you don't mind that, please read and review, and of course constructive criticism is always welcome, as it helps me learn. Thanks and enjoy!

**Disclaimer **All **Grey's Anatomy** characters and related logos belong to **Shonda Rhymes** and **ABC**. Lyrics belong to **Tegan & Sara**.

-**Addison Elliot**

---

**Chapter One: Take Me Anywhere**

**---**

**You say you don't see any part of me to love in all this mess.**

**And I know you take the good and all the bad that comes with me.**

**Take me by the hand and tell me you would take me anywhere.**

**---**

Addison Montgomery had never been more sick of Seattle Grace hospital in all of the year and a half she had worked there. The nauseatingly clean smell of antiseptic clawed ruthlessly at her nose, giving her a gigantonormous (in her spare time she had come up with a new word to describe it, because gigantic and enormous didn't seem to relate just how gigantonormous it was, but gigantnormous worked quite efficiently) head-ache that seemed set on making the world spin. _Sit still!_ she ordered the spinning from. Addison forced the most sincere -- albeit fake -- smile she thought she could muster to the family of -- she checked the chart clutched tightly in her arms -- Diana Spinner before slipping outside of the room; letting the door slide shut; taking a deep breath as she tried to get her bearings straight. Sub-conciously, she lifted her long, calloused surgeons fingers to rub at her temples, which, subsequently, seemed only to increase the ferocity of her migraine. The lights above her seemed all too bright, glaring at her with such intensity that she slid along the wall and fumbled until her hand came into contact with the nearest door handle, and she turned it, walking (more like stumbling, staggering, falling clumsily, take your pick) into the room which just so happened, luckily enough, to be a broom closet. The pain in her head seemed enough to knock her unconscious, and still she dilligently avoided Alex Karev in the pitiful hope that their little rendezvous last week... and the week before that... and the week before that... _Stop it! _Addison mentally ordered, silently berating herself for losing her train of thought. She had been having a particularly stressful month; that was all.

_Still_, Addison thought gloomily, _he deserved to know_. Oh, sweet fucking irony. She had been so set on this, so excited in L.A. at the thought of becoming a mother; that was the cure, she had thought. That was it. No more empty, quiet,silent, echoingly still houses. Baby cries and soft pinks or blues or yellows... that would be her life. Until Naomi had confirmed the nagging fear that had hung around in her sub-conscious since the idea had popped into her head. And now this. Now she was pregnant with Alex Karev's baby, and she was stuck somewhere between wanting so badly to keep it and knowing that it was impossible. Of course, she could always just have the baby without him knowing... no. She shoved that thought down the minute it bobbed to the surface of her conscious mind. That was not going to happen. She wasn't going to end up one of those women screaming at the supposed father of their baby on Jerry Springer. Or worse... Dr. Phil. She shuddered and let her head fall into her hands.

Addison was pretty sure it was more than just sex in his eyes (in her eyes?). Once was a coincidence, twice was a pattern, and three times was a habit. That was the rule, right? Well, what was five (six) times? The surgeon scrubbed her hands over her face in an effort to wake herself up a bit more as she stood, opened the door, maneuvered the halls on auto-pilot; nights since the positive pregnancy test had been sleepless and filled with worry, doubt, anxiety... she had taken the liberty to re-schedule any big surgeries for this week to thenext, when Addison hoped she would be feeling a bit better. Nothing big, luckily, had ocurred so far; an emergency C-section had been her only surgery for the day, and there had been no problems, though the baby was at least three weeks pre-mature, and currently fighting, struggling, battling to live -- valiantly, by the way -- up in the NICU.

---

And that was where her feet took her, she realized, as her eyes focused blurrily onto the glass window behind which eighteen babies, eighteen of her patients, eighteen humans who's well-being was entrusted upon her, were surviving due only to the advancements of modern medicine and their will to do so. Something like that put her view into a new perspective, and she stared, transfixed, until a passing scrub nurse gave her an awkward glance. Breaking out of her hypnotic state, Addison pushed the double-doors open and entered the room; she was greeted by the steady beeping of the monitors, and the outside noises were drowned out as the glass barrier shut between her, an OB/GYN intern, and the peaceful calm of the NICU.

"Dr. Montgomery," Marietta Evans greeted proffessionally on her way out, and Addison could only nod in aknowledgement as the young woman exited the room; the glass barrier swung open and in surged a parade of sound, shouting doctors, the peck of computer keys as nurses checked files, the rolling of gurneys, and then all was silent again as they closed behind the intern's retreating form.

"Hey, guys," she breathed quietly, and her voice sounded foreign in the stillness of the room.

No answer.

"You know, you really should try and get better. There are a lot of things in life you don't want to miss," she continued, walking forward a bit and peeking tentatively into the nearest incubator chamber.

She smiled as baby boy Anderson, the preemie she had delivered merely hours ago, turned his head toward her, reaching out blindly with tiny pink fingers. Addison reached her own finger through the open chamber and let the newborn wrap her index finger within his own tiny hand. She marveled at the transparency of his paper-thin skin. In the brilliance of the hospital's lights the small boy might as well have been a ghost. Addison traced the path his veins took up through his hand, his wrist, up his arm with her eyes, trying to imagine the warm blood surging through them, fighting desperately to keep his under-developed heart beating. She could feel his stringy pulse as her thumb traced along his wrist. One... two... And then she was talking again, or listening to someone else talk; she wasn't quite sure.

"Ice cream on a hot day. That's way up there. Rain. That was my favorite thing when I was little. I loved the rain. It rains a lot here in Seattle. I used to run around in the rain, and dance in it. It's refreshing, and the morning after a good, hard rain, everything is clean and wet." Her voice was soft and fragile, barely a whisper, and she wondered vaguely why she spoke so low, but it seemed an unspoken rule to be small and quiet in this room. _Everyone else was, after all_, she thought, scanning the room with a shimmering emerald gaze; her eyes were swimming, gleaming, with would-be tears.

Anderson squeezed her hand timidly, then yawned and let his eyes flutter shut, tugging her finger up to his mouth. She smiled a little bit and closed her eyes, trying to picture her baby. It would have Alex's eyes: soft brown, honest and kind, but tough and demanding. She smirked. _Very_ demanding. They didn't ask for more than anyone could give, but pushed you to give your best. Quietly, she detached herself from the baby's firm grip, images of the tiny being growing inside of her dancing through her head in fleeting glances, small and insignifigant, but almost surreally important to herself. Addison wondered what Alex would say if he knew, wondered if she should tell him. Would he be angry? She wondered if it always felt so intimidating. Should she ask a patient what it was like? Was she alone? She wondered whether her child would have her auburn hair or Alex's brownish blondish coloring.

"So you focus on getting better, so you can see the rain, alright, Anderson?" she asked rhetorically, though she knew the little boy would give it his all. He was a fighter. She looked down at him but saw a stranger looking up at her; she didn't know this baby. She didn't know any of these babies. And they wouldn't remember her. Wouldn't remember the doctor that saved their tiny lives. But their lives were all entrusted upon her anyway. She graced her stomach timidly with her hand. If Addison gave up her baby, it wouldn't remember her either. She felt sick. But she would remember it. She couldn't imagine forgetting something (someone!) like that. Like her and Alex.

"Zach."

Addison spun around and immediately regretted it; the quick move caused her head to throb violently and her stomach to flip-flop. She imagined herself turning a sickening shade of green and fought to keep the contents of her stomach down (though somewhere in the back of her mind -- the part that was always detached and indifferent -- she remembered that she had not eaten anything that day). "What?" she asked warily of Alex, who stood with a half-smile on his rugged features.

"Zach. Zachary. The kid's name is Zach," he said again, softly, as if he could tell she needed the quiet right now. He always had that about him; he could read her, and there were times when she loved it and times when she hated it. Now, she realized, she was grateful. "Zach," she murmured, as if in confirmation, and he nodded almost unintelligibly. She watched the muscles in his neck flex and relax and the indifferent part in the back of her mind wondered if he ever worked out. He seemed the type.

"I haven't seen you in a few days," he ventured as he approached her, and they both watched as the restless Zachary tossed and squirmed in his sleep. "Pit's been pretty boring." She stiffened slightly at his accusation, but did not reply. He sighed slightly in aggravation but remained quiet, and they existed there, in an eternity (a few seconds) of tense silence. Alex dared to rest his hand lightly on her shoulder, but she flinched away and rebuffed timidly.

"Vagina squad growing on you, then, Karev?" she asked jokingly, but it didn't take Alex's skills in reading her to hear the underlying shadow of emotional wreckage that lay beneath the innocent jab.

"It has that tendency," he replied, and suddenly Addison had the strange feeling that they were not in Kansas anymore. Zachary Anderson reminded him of her presence in the room as he shifted and made an odd gurgling sound somewhere in the back of his throat. For a fraction of a second, Addison wondered what he would look like with Alex's eyes.

"I..." she started, her voice cracking on a faint whisper. "Need to sleep," she finished hastily, recoiling from Zach's incubator as if she had been burned. "I'm so tired," she whispered faintly, smiling painfully, running her hand through her locks of fiery hair. "I'm just so goddamn tired." She laughed a bit, bitterly, and looked up at him; he watched her, concern etching the fine lines of his face, and Addison was taken aback at the maturity he displayed, the arrogance swept from his demeanor. His stature was inclined slightly toward her, as if waiting and willing to catch her, and his honest, brutally honest brown eyes were glittering with worry. She wondered, vaguely, where Dr. Evil Spawn had gone, what had he done with him, the innocent child that had entered this program so young and fresh and unscarred?

_How do we get from there to here?_ Addison wondered, with a furtive glance at Zach's sleeping form.

"I hate Seattle," she murmured almost inaudibly, but Alex caught it and pursed his lips, trying to decide how he was to reply. Obviously, she was in a bit of a fragile state. She looked drained and pained and hollow and ready to drop from the sheer weight of whatever invisible force that seemed to be on her shoulders; was it just him or did she look shorter than usual?

"You've been working a lot lately.. why don't you head home, I'll cover for you. You can trust me, Addi," he added hastily at her doubtful look. "I'm not... anymore," he breathed.

"I... I know. What happened to you, Alex?" But she knew. Wished she didn't, but did.

No one could see death, could live death, on a daily basis and not grow wise beyond their years. She hated herself silently for putting this upon him, for robbing him of his innocence and leaving in its place the hollow feeling of a Doctor. The Saving the Lives and the Taking Them.

A sharp stab of guilt.

And then nothing.

Nothing at all.

At least the room had decided to stay still for a moment.

"I grew up for you, Addi," he said with a small smile as he edged closer and put an arm securely around her waist. She wondered if he was just really strong or if she was just really weak, but suddenly she felt okay and stable and suddenly, she just really, really, really wanted to sleep. Okay, maybe not so suddenly. And so it was only natural for her to reply with a small nod into his chest when he said softly, "Let me take you home, Addison."

"Take me anywhere, Alex," she murmured into him, and she could have sworn she felt the flutter of his lips against the crown of her head.

---

Addison didn't fall asleep in the car until they were almost halfway to their destination. Her eyelids drooped dangerously low and her breathing was the slow and even rhythm of someone enjoying a deep, refreshing sleep, but she was wide awake and alert and _tired_. Alex watched her not so obviously out of the corner of his eye, but Addison was in that hyper-alert state of someone who was on the verge of conciousness and unconsciousness and so she caught his worrisome glances despite their miniscule facade.

She didn't mind all that much.

"How long have you been on-call, Addi?" he asked gently, not needing to raise his voice, as the radio spilled some classic rock song on the lowest volume available and the windows were all up.

"Long enough," she answered stubbornly, and she was spared any further poking and prodding.

He put his hand over her bare knee (her skirt had hitched a bit in her sitting/reclining position), the one that had been bouncing in an even rhythm with the song that he could not make out the words to, and she stopped and blushed and, before his very eyes, fell asleep. He smiled and kept his hand firmly yet gently in place for the remainder of the journey.


End file.
